Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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The problem right now is that we need to find better ways to turn renewable energy into stable, reliable power. The power production problem is highly dependent on balancing power generation and demand, and any excess energy must be stored, used, or wasted.
The main benefit of gas/coal/etc. is that we can (almost) always control the output to a close margin based off of demand projections, which are typically updated every 15 minutes. That being said, the drawbacks of using this form of generation are obvious and need to be addressed.
For renewables like solar and wind, we can't always predict the output, so in the larger scale of power balance, we need to supplement it with something that can make up for fluctuations in generation. In the current system, this is from conventional sources.
The goal is to implement a robust energy storage system, ideally one that can hold a huge amount of excess renewable power during the day (largely due to solar), and reliable output that power when it is needed (higher demand at night). I would love to see the day where our nation is fully powered by renewables, and I'm super happy to see that there have been pushes to build up renewables, but the target scenario relies on big advancements in storage.
I would suggest anyone who is interested in what I said to look up "california duck curve solar" for some reading on what challenges solar overgen presents in bright and sunny states.
All that being said... we can do it! I sincerely hope we reach a point where we can phase out dirty generation across the globe, but it will take a lot of time and effort.
source: taking several power systems courses as part of my EE degree
Much of this can be solved or mitigated with pumped hydro, green hydrogen, thermal batteries, or maybe compressed air. The problem is that all of this requires infrastructure spending.
California's duck curve specifically can be flattened with desalination. Any excess power that California makes with solar beyond the grid's demand should just go into making more fresh water. Having too much solar energy is really just a problem of not having systems you can turn on when you do. Even if you only get 30% of the power back with green hydrogen it is power you had too much of in the first place.
One gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 33.7kWh of electricity and your average American home uses 29kWh of electricity a day. We've been perfectly fine wasting energy for over a century, I don't see why we should pearl clutch now.
Agreed. This is spending that our country isn't willing to do, mostly because of what we already have (both in terms of infrastructure and in political influence). Personally, I hate this.
As for Cali's duck curve issue, desalination is a great idea, but expansion of renewables and storage should really come first. Keep in mind that the current Cali grid generates much less dirty power during the day, where solar covers a majority of demand. Should we divert that solar power to desalination, we would need to ramp up dirty power generation during the day, and we would continue to generate dirty power at night.
While I agree with you, we also have to consider what this would do at scale. The 70% of excess power that you lose here translates to wear on the solar panel systems that is never realized into power. That is, the systems will wear at the same rate, but the amount of power you can utilize over the lifespan of the systems is decreased. It's still a better solution than not implementing these at all, but I'd be wary as to how reluctant our society would be to the spending, especially if the ratio of cost to utilization(?) becomes skewed.
Well, that's an issue in of itself. It'd be great if we could waste less power in conventional generation, but it'd be even better if we could match or even beat that with renewables. I hope we can reach a point where everyone can agree to implement renewables sooner than later, but I don't see dirty power's political influence allowing for changes until renewable is equal to or better than dirty power. Which sucks, but a lot about our political system sucks.
I'm not talking about using solar to make fresh water. I'm talking about using the excess power to make fresh water as to not put more power into the grid than it can use. The duck curve is often used as a sticking point for why nuclear doesn't work, because nuclear needs a base load and the duck curve is a base load nuclear can't accommodate.
Obviously more storage to use more renewables but also, just use the excess for something. Nuclear can boil water to desalinate, use excess electricity to desalinate via RO. Given the infrastructure you could even use this to water California's immense farms. (But power companies like making profit so... no times of free power, climate change instead please)
With how cheap PV panels are per mW it is not really an issue about how efficiently the power is stored. We'd obviously want to recycle them but generally the fact that you don't pay for fuel means eventually the power is free. There was a study done in LA where if you covered just the parking lots with solar you could provide power for the entire city (if storage was available obviously)
A chemical battery will be somewhere like 80% or more efficient but they can't hold that for weeks, months, or years.
Pumped Hydro is ideal, the Hoover Dam produces 4.5 billion kWh of electricity a year. With pumped hydro you can effectively do the same thing in places rain doesn't do it for you. Bath county for instance has 24,000mWh of capacity. They're obviously really dangerous if they break and also damage ecosystems.
But green hydrogen can be done mostly anywhere, stored more easily (obviously not as easy as fossil fuels or well most things) and can be transported.
That's really more of an indictment on LA having too much parking than anything else.
Put the solar panels on the roofs. Replace the worthless parking lots with more productive buildings. And, obviously, quit forcing everybody to drive everywhere.
I agree but I feel that is even more aspirational than renewable energy.
Personally I want high speed rail, commuter rail, trams, and bike infrastructure but I'll probably be dead by the time any of that happens if it does at all.
The whole base load situation is largely over hyped, as a diverse and slightly overbuilt network of renewable would compensate for fluctuations with minimal storage needed. Iirc you would just need 118% capacity with a 2 hour storage buffer to achieve stability rates on par with a traditional grid. And nuclears small footprint actually hinders it when filling a base load requirement, as nuclear provides a lot of power at a single location, but if you want to base load a national grid you want a little power at lots of locations. (Which can be argued that SMRs will fill that role, but that's a whole other argument)
What are SMRs?
Small modular reactors. It's an unproven technology that tech bros love to talk about like its magic and going to fix everything.